[DanielBMarkham]

Just to be clear, all of you geeks out there watching the space travel develop and dreaming of a science-fiction type future where people can visit multiple planets and space travel is common? Paging Elon Musk?

Guess what? There are factions that are actively moving to make sure that doesn't happen. As it turns out, many believe that we need to be so cautious that even if we could get in a rocket tomorrow and go to Mars for ten bucks that we shouldn't be allowed to do that. At least not without a few committees meeting first and some ever-growing regulations being consulted. Some, I'm willing to believe, already feel very adamantly that mankind is a pestilence and should be prevented from spreading.

And each year those efforts get more and more organized.

In NASA's defense, this looks like something they've set up in order to head this issue off at the pass. So when somebody says "But what about us contaminating the Solar System!" they can point to some processes and rules that makes sure that the matter was considered appropriately.

But when folks ask me what mankind's future is, to me it looks a lot stagnation by our own hand. Pages like this do not do much to persuade me otherwise.

[wkdown]

I suppose I can understand the argument. I know if/when we find life on another planet or moon (Europa, Titan, etc) that no living matter from Earth should touch that world, for fear of mutating / polluting it. But when it comes to others we either know have no life (Mercury, Jupiter, etc) or most likely don't (Venus, Mars, etc), what is the harm in human exploration or even terraforming attempts?

Even if humans "infected" the whole solar system, how can we spread from there? The Centauri system is the next closest star system [1], most likely without planets there, and is over 4ly away. That's roughly 25 trillion miles away. If we could travel at the same speed as New Horizons (36,373mph) [2], it would still take 77.5 thousand YEARS to get there. [3]

We are not gonna pollute the universe and its a silly to think ourselves capable of such a feat.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Near-star...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons

[3] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+to+travel+24.7+tri...

[pavel_lishin]

The worry isn't about "polluting the universe", it's about contaminating what's basically a big scientific petri dish - Mars. If we start tossing buckets of sludge out there, determining whether there was ever any native life becomes significantly more difficult.

"There are elements trying to keep us from spreading throughout the universe" sounds incredibly paranoid.

[ams6110]

Hard to imagine that any life that formed independently on Mars would ever be confused with life tranplanted there from Earth...... unless life on Earth came from Mars to begin with?

[MichaelSalib]

Perhaps given a full blown xenobiology laboratory staffed with hundreds of the world's top scientists and every instrument money can buy, it would be easy to distinguish earth-borne bacteria from non-earth-borne bacteria. But since we've only got a car-sized rover with a handful of instruments and no scientists on site, we need to be more careful.

In any event, how exactly do you differentiate earth-borne bacteria from non-earth-borne bacteria? What's your rubric?

[AutoCorrect]

dna.

[colkassad]

>Guess what? There are factions that are actively moving to make sure that doesn't happen.

Do you have any examples? This is interesting. Reminds me of the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.

[_delirium]

It's not exactly a recent one so more of historical interest, but back when people thought interplanetary colonization was actually plausible in the near term, C.S. Lewis was an advocate against it. He wrote a dystopian sci-fi trilogy containing a good amount of satire on the subject [1], which sparked an on-again-off-again correspondence, cordial but without much agreement, with Arthur C. Clarke, initiated when Clarke wrote to object to some passages in Perelandra [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Trilogy

[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743475186/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

[nateabele]

Based on the above, I'm pretty sure you've never actually read the Space Trilogy. Lewis isn't advocating for or against anything. The stories are allegorical.

Setting them on planets other than Earth (although the third book takes place exclusively on Earth) provides an opportunity to examine closely-held beliefs commonly taken for granted.

[_delirium]

Clarke may have been reading too much into Perelandra by interpreting it that way, but Lewis didn't seem to object to that reading in the correspondence, and defended a view that Weston really was an accurate portrayal of what what Lewis saw as a likely future outcome of space-travel, an arrogant war of conquest to dominate the galaxy and subjugate any other worlds that might exist, in pursuit of technology and power.

Among other comments from his letters:

I don't of course think at the moment many scientists are budding Westons: but I do think (hang it all, I live among scientists!) that a point of view not unlike Weston's is on the way ... a race devoted to the increase of its own power by technology with complete indifference to ethics does seem to me a cancer in the Universe.

He also liked to sign off his letters to Clarke with comments like, "I wish you every success except a practical realization of space travel".

edit: A bit more in the section "Lewis and space exploration" here: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1754/1

[nateabele]

Thanks for the clarification, I see what you're getting at.

I wouldn't interpret his writings as anti-space-travel in any way, but you have to understand Weston's character arc across books 1 & 2. Lewis was arguing against the ideal that motivated many peoples' interests in space travel at the time, and the philosophical underpinnings of their views on morality and humanity.

I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that someone of Lewis' intellect would so readily throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater on one of the greatest frontiers of human exploration.

Here, this guy puts it much better than I did: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1754/1#IDComment332377...

Edit: Adding expository link.

[samstave]

The Georgia Guidestones.

[MichaelSalib]

This sort of paranoia is really bizarre to see.

There are 7 billion people on this planet. For every absurd and stupid notion, there are millions of adherents. But people who think that humanity must never colonize other planets don't matter because:

1. They have no power

2. We're not going to colonize anything in the next few decades anyway; sending people to Mars would cost a trillion dollars and no one is interested in paying for that

I mean, you're taking something very simple, namely, a science organization takes some precautions to keep their scientific instrument from ruining the experiment it is going to conduct, and reinterpreting it as part of some vast conspiracy. That's...not healthy.

[alinajaf]

Kim Stanley Robisons Mars Trilogy is mostly about this (i.e. 'Mankind is a pestilance' vs. 'We are the consciousness of the universe')

[tocomment]

I agree with you. This kind of stuff makes me kind of hope we don't find any signs of life on Mars. Hopefully at that point there would be nothing to protect from contamination.

[DanielBMarkham]

I agree. But here's the conundrum: how you can you ever be sure there isn't life somewhere? From a logistics and logical standpoint, it's impossible. All you can say is "We haven't found life so far" ADD: And are we saying that separately-evolved strains of life should never have interaction with each other unless we can be sure of all of the consequences? Sure, many of the consequences will be catastrophic, but is it better never to leave home or explore? It makes me very sad to realize than many would say yes, it is.

sigh

[pavel_lishin]

> how you can you ever be sure there isn't life somewhere?

You can't. You establish a given threshold, after which it's no longer reasonable to maintain a quarantine.

[MichaelSalib]

It makes me very sad to realize than many would say yes, it is.

Do you have a cite? Or are you talking about very many imaginary people?

[anigbrowl]

Some, I'm willing to believe, already feel very adamantly that mankind is a pestilence and should be prevented from spreading.

Oh rubbish. It's basic lab protocol that you don't contaminate your samples, and we're at the very early stages of sample-gathering. We're just at the stage of figuring out whether Mars has ever had liquid water or not, so your worries about budget interplanetary travel being held up by interfering bureaucrats are almost comically premature.

[api]

I've come to the deep conviction that both the "right" and the "left" -- in their present forms -- are impediments to virtually all progress and must be destroyed.